Celebrities

Yo.

He created two of the biggest movie franchises of all time, wrote eight scripts, generated nearly $4 billion for the studios, and has been spoken of in the same breath as Charlie Chaplin. (Seriously.) Yet Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone gets no love from Hollywood. He's not angry about it. Just a little bruised

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Say the guy's name and people are more than likely to give you an eye roll. After forty years in Hollywood and fifty films, he's become, for most people, a cartoon buffoon. A punch line.

And I can say, I get it.

I know where you're coming from.

But men, I just want to say this: We are all Stallone.

Think about it: How many filmmakers have created two characters who so neatly embody the conflicting sides that live inside every guy? The romantic and the warrior; the dreamer and the destroyer; the underestimated and the misunderstood; the lonely and the loner; the Rocky and the Rambo. How many people have written—that's right, written, because Stallone, despite the image that he is preliterate, has written eight scripts and been nominated for best screenplay—dialogue and scenes that resonate so deeply with men?

Yes, Stallone is all of us. A guy who gets
no respect for what he's accomplished, because the establishment, no matter what he does, will see him as they want to see him.

And yet Stallone
is okay with that.

Sly Stallone knows who he is.

Sly—that's who he is. What he is.

*****

Most days, Stallone sits at a desk in a dinky two-story office building in Beverly Hills. It's a run-down building, the paint faded and cracked by the unforgiving sun, the way things in L.A. always seem to dry out after they've been exposed too long. On the front, a sign says Trademark Entertainment. Some time ago, though, someone painted over Trademark, so now it's just plain old Entertainment. Next to the building there's a tiny parking lot where Stallone parks. A man in a vest and a bow tie lets down the chain that keeps other cars out.

I buzz a buzzer—the kind of buzzer you might find in a medical building when going to see a dentist.

"Yeah?"

"I'm here to see Mr. Stallone?"

Gggggzzzz! Click! Slam!

Stallone's office is on the second floor. There's a twentysomething dude/receptionist. The waiting room is orange and lined with detritus of Stallone's movies, like the wrought-iron sign that says Tools—it hangs outside the tattoo parlor in The Expendables, Stallone's new movie, about a band of mercenaries who go to South America and take on a general who is the puppet of a rogue CIA agent. It stars just about every '80s macho man, from Stallone to Dolph Lundgren to Steve Austin to Mickey Rourke. There's even a scene of Stallone with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

Stallone's standing behind his desk when I'm shown in. He's wearing black pants, a pale pink short-sleeve shirt, and glasses, the lenses of which are tinted lavender. He's 64 now, but his biceps are still huge, and it looks like there are small snakes under his skin. On the wall behind his desk is a copy of the front page of the New York Post from March 29, 1977. There's a photo of Stallone and the producers of Rocky after winning the Oscar for Best Picture—having just beaten out All the President's Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver. Stallone's shirt is unbuttoned, and he wears no bow tie; his arms are raised, Rocky-style. The headline: "Rocky" KO's Hollywood.

Stallone squeezes a small plastic
bottle and some goo drips into his palm. He rubs his hands together, then shakes mine and says, "Just washing my hands. It's not bubonic plague or nothin'." He gestures toward the couch. That's when I see it: Filling one wall is a bookcase lined top to bottom with action figure after action figure of…Sylvester Stallone. Or rather, as Rambo and as Rocky. It looks like the bedroom bookshelf of a 12-year-old boy—if that 12-year-old boy could somehow collect action figures of nothing but himself.

Let's start with Rocky. My mother
took me to see it, and it was just mythic for me. It made a difference in my life.
It certainly made a difference in mine. It wasn't like I went in there with this blueprint for success. I worked on instinct. I wanted a guy who talks like a child, and somewhere in there are incredible nuts of wisdom. But he's one malapropism after another. I'd never seen that in any boxing film. Rocky's about a guy who's just trying to get something out of life. He knows he's a ham 'n' egger. He says, "I'm not even worth giving a title shot to. I'm a joke. But I've got me this girl." That was great. I said, "If we can go there, and the by-product is he happens to fight, there's a movie." If it was just about the fight, you'd be bored.

Do you know what you, Charlie Chaplin, and Orson Welles have in common?
Um…Mediterranean diet?

With Rocky, you were the only three to ever have been nominated for best actor and best screenplay in the same year.
Chaplin wrote me after Rocky. Three people wrote me that I never got over. One was the president, the second was Chaplin, and the third was Frank Capra, when I lost for best actor. Talk about Capra-esque! I said, "Damn, I'm just a guy off the streets of New York. Charlie Chaplin!" And they all identified with my character. Capra wrote, "But take heart, angels make note of things like that. Because it's fitting that the character you created, Rocky, would lose, that other people would take all the glory."
I never forgot that.

What did Chaplin say?
Chaplin said, "Rocky reminds me of a
little character I used to play. We'd love for you to come to Switzerland and visit." And you know what? I never went. A few months later, he was dead. Same thing with Elvis.